


une étrangeté

by Askance



Category: Versailles (TV 2015)
Genre: M/M, Nudity, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-13 23:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11195487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: They'd played at woodland creatures, fauns and satyrs. Henriette a dryad they'd chase through the trees. They hadn't cared so much about nakedness then, or reputation. Hadn't really known about fear.





	une étrangeté

The Chevalier is a restless sleeper. He sprawls, grabs, snores; once, Philippe found him the wrong way round in bed, his head hanging off the end, mouth open, the morning sun shining full on his face. Most nights he wakes gently once or twice to the feeling of his cold fingers worming under his nightdress or into his hair, and falls back asleep with the Chevalier's warmth pressed up behind him.

 

He doesn't hear the door opening, or the footsteps on the floor. He feels the cold hand on his wrist and assumes, barely woken, that the Chevalier is stirring; he turns over in bed, feels his soft hair under his chin, and settles; but then again, on his shoulder, and Philippe opens his eyes to see the back of the Chevalier's head, sits up too fast, turns his unadjusted eyes toward the candlelight hovering at the side of his bed.

 

It's Louis, standing in his dressing gown and nightdress, with a candlestick in his hand.

 

For a moment, Philippe looks at him, still half-asleep, and then sees the doorway of the back passage open behind him, a black rectangle in the dark. There is no one else in the room, no guards, no Bontemps.

 

“What is it?” he whispers.

 

“Come,” Louis says, softly. Behind Philippe, the Chevalier mumbles, readjusts.

 

Philippe doesn't move. The surprise of being woken is wearing off, and the irritation of being woken by _Louis_ is settling in. He opens his mouth to say something snide about being tired, and having perfectly good dreams—though in fact, he had not been dreaming at all—but Louis has already turned, the light running down the golden threads in his robe, and is moving into the darkness of the back passageway, with purpose.

 

Philippe sighs, drops back down onto his pillow for a moment. The Chevalier is fast asleep, clutching the bedsheets like a child with a toy; he reaches over and twines a finger in his long blonde hair and then lets it fall.

 

The passage doorway is still open. There is light inside. 

 

He mumbles under his breath, sits up, stands, pulling his nightdress down over his knees. His robe is laid across a chair near the door—not nearly so golden as his brother's.

 

He closes the passage door behind him.

 

Louis is waiting around the first corner. His eyes are so pale in the light as to be almost pure white. He smiles when Philippe comes round; he doesn't seem to have caught on to his brother's irritation.

 

“What are you doing?” Philippe says, rubbing sleep from his eyes, squinting in the candlelight. “Does Bontemps know you are out of bed and about?”

 

“I wish to go bathing,” Louis says, “and I wish you to come with me.”

 

Philippe blinks at him.

 

“I was sleeping.”

 

“And now you are not.”

 

There's a delight in Louis' voice that makes Philippe feel ancient.

 

“Bathing,” Philippe says, as Louis turns and begins to walk again, a blur of gold in the dark corridor, “at this time of night? We'll be seen.”

 

Louis doesn't answer.

 

“They already think you mad,” Philippe says, hoping to at least give his brother pause, but Louis has been moving through these back passages since he could walk, and so has Philippe, and there isn't even the hesitation of an unfamiliar corridor to slow down the King.

 

Philippe pulls his robe closed across his chest, follows. His grumbles echo back and forth between the cold stone walls. He wonders if the Chevalier has noticed, yet, that he has gone.

 

He hasn't used these passageways frequently in years—not since he was first beginning to understand himself, leading servant boys and nobles' sons and minstrels back to his rooms when his mother and Louis were not looking. When it became clear that no one cared, he stopped. They always felt like Louis' halls, somehow; Louis' secret. Magical, in their way, though everyone uses them; somehow, they still belong to Louis.

 

Especially at night. 

 

He is utterly lost by the time Louis finally stops, having made his way through the twists and turns as if he built them himself—and perhaps these corridors are new; Philippe would not know—and when he opens the door in the wall Philippe is surprised to feel the night breeze on his face.

 

Louis blows out his candle and sets the stick down on the floor. Philippe watches his silhouette as he steps out of his slippers, through the rectangle of night sky, and motions his brother after him.

 

Philippe glances back the way they came, then toward the blue-flushed world outside; far away he can see the torches of the palace guard, standing in place every hour of the night. The pebbled walkways through the hedgerows almost glow. He can see a sliver of the moon.

 

He takes off his slippers, places them neatly next to the softly-smoking candlestick, and is sure to give Louis a look of penetrating disapproval as he steps into the soft, wet grass at the edge of the palace.

 

“Mad,” he says again.

 

Louis grins.

 

“Come,” he says. “There is a fountain that has been turned off for repairs.”

 

“A fountain.”

 

“Hidden.”

 

“Wonderful.” 

 

If Louis can hear the distaste in his brother's voice, he doesn't comment on it. Or he relishes it; Philippe can never be sure of him.

 

It's a pleasant night. Philippe will grant him that. 

 

They keep toward the palace wall, out of the line of sight of anyone in livery, and as Louis looks both ways across the lawn like a Parisian scouting the streets for oncoming carriages, Philippe amuses himself with images of Bontemps chastising His Majesty all the way back up to bed, in his bare feet and nightdress, in full view of everyone. Delicious.

 

But he follows him, because there is nothing else to do. Certainly he could turn tail, find his way back through the mess of corridors to his rooms, crawl back into bed with the Chevalier and bother him awake with his cold, wet feet. But it's been too long, he thinks, underneath the simmering annoyance in his brain, since he's seen his brother do anything that remotely smacked of fun.

 

Louis does not smile very often anymore. Louis' smile makes him dizzy. He'll never admit it.

 

Behind a hedgerow by the lake, crouching like spies. Philippe holds his nightdress down around his knees; the wind is coming in gusts. Louis looks ridiculous ahead of him, like a hunchback, and Philippe can't help smiling.

 

“There,” Louis says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “through the trees a ways.” The fountain is enclosed by evergreens, but Philippe can just barely see the moonlight reflecting on the smooth, wrought bronze, an alien shape in the forest.

 

“I remember,” Philippe says, and he does. They'd played in that fountain as children, before there was any real difference between them save age, before people began calling him  _Monsieur._ It was still a hunting lodge then—an escape. Far from Paris. 

 

They'd played at woodland creatures, fauns and satyrs. Henriette a dryad they'd chase through the trees. They hadn't cared so much about nakedness then, or reputation. Hadn't really known about fear.

 

Louis seems to think they are out of sight, and he stands, shedding his brocaded robe, leaving it in a crumpled heap on the grass, and Philippe has to keep from flinching. He stoops to pick it up and drapes it across the thorny leaves of the nearest hedge, frowning, and then places his own next to it.

 

The forest brush is sharp and unstable underfoot, and Philippe has to keep his eye on the white mass of his brother's nightdress ahead of him to keep from losing him in the trees. He wishes he'd brought his slippers. The momentary novelty of being outside after dark is wearing thin.

 

He could be back inside—if not sleeping, then drinking, or watching the stars through the windowpanes. His feet would not be wet. The Chevalier would be wound up around him like a creeping vine, just the way he likes it. His bedsheets are just in from Marseilles, too—silk, and very expensive. He steps on something soft and white.

 

He must still be half-asleep, because it takes him a full minute to realize it's Louis' nightdress.

 

Philippe looks up. 

 

He hadn't realized they'd cleared the woods, that the fountain is only a few feet away, the water in its basin black and still. This one was never finished, though it runs; he never knew why; the half-formed rearing horses and flying cherubs cut into the sky like blades. 

 

Louis has already stepped inside. Philippe can see the stark white of his bare back as clearly as if it were daylight.

 

“Aren't you coming?” Louis says, too loudly for Philippe's comfort, without turning back to look at him.

 

“Someone will hear you,” Philippe says, but without much conviction.

 

Louis does a lazy turn in the water, his arms outstretched to skim the surface. He smiles at Philippe, standing at the edge of the woods, the hem of his nightdress muddy, his feet grass-stained, and then lazily turns again, half-waltzing through the motionless fountain, vanishing behind the statuary in the center.

 

Philippe sighs, looks down at himself—a proper mess he's made, and he can already hear the chambermaids tittering about the mysterious stains as they haul his things off to the laundry; his feet itch.

 

He waits until Louis is out of sight and pulls his nightdress off over his head, tossing it over a boulder nearby. The air is warm on his skin. He steps carefully over the rim of the fountain and slides his legs in, yanking in a breath—it's cold—and then eases himself all the way down, until the slick floor of the fountain, furred with algae, is solid under his feet, and the water is up to his waist.

 

“You couldn't have picked a running fountain, I suppose,” he says, daring to let his voice edge above a whisper. The trees swallow it; he glances back, but the torchlight of the palace guard is steady and unmoving and farther away than he'd imagined.

 

“I like this one.” Louis' voice is closer than he expects, and Philippe catches a glimpse of his body moving through a gap in the statuary. Everything is strange in the dark. “It's quiet.”

 

“Could be dangerous,” Philippe says. He rests the palms of his hands on the surface of the water, thinking of assassins crouched in the trees, crossbows aimed. The branches rustle and  _hush_ in the breeze. 

 

“You are here, are you not? I could not be safer.” Louis appears from behind a bronze horse, fingertips trailing over its striking hooves. He smiles, and Philippe scoffs.

 

He lets his shoulders relax, finally, and his hands slip below the water.

 

Louis keeps walking, dreamily, around the center of the fountain; Philippe doesn't know what to do, except watch. 

 

He has seen his brother naked before, of course. Most mornings of his life. As children. By accident. His shoulders are always straight, his spine always upright, his poise unfailing. Even when he thinks no one is watching. He walks like a dancer, and he is one; he makes certain that the court knows it, too. But tonight he lets his shoulders roll forward, his spine relax. It's unnatural, Philippe thinks, and a little bit wonderful. He could almost forget that he is bathing with the King of France. He could almost believe he were simply bathing with his brother.

 

“What are you doing?” Philippe asks, as Louis vanishes around the statuary again. He drifts forward, relishing the tug and pull of the cold water at his legs and his hips. He cannot remember the last time he bathed out of doors. 

 

He hears Louis sigh. “I feel feverish.”

 

“We'll send for the doctor.”

 

Philippe reaches a bronze horse and turns into it, resting his back between two raised hooves, sinking by fractions into the water until the ends of his hair begin to float, and then rising back up. If not for the sound of the water dripping from his body, the sound of Louis moving through it, there would be an almost perfect silence.

 

Louis wades toward the edge of the fountain, pauses there, leans against it. Philippe looks at him, the dark tangle of his hair, the sharp bones of his hips just above the surface. He is looking up at the moon; Philippe looks, too, but only for a moment.

 

“I haven't slept,” the King says.

 

“Running wild through the grounds does make that difficult.”

 

“Do you enjoy vexing me?”

 

“Oh, immensely.”

 

He can tell Louis is smiling by the cast of his shoulders. Relaxes more into the shape of the horse at his back. 

 

“It isn't like you,” Philippe says, more gently. 

 

“What isn't?”

 

“This. Being rash. Sneaking off. One would think you were a boy again.”

 

Louis braces his hands against the fountain's edge. His head drops between his shoulders. Philippe watches a breath rise against his brother's back and sink down again.

 

“Every morning the same men dress me,” he says, finally. “The same people greet me in the hallways. We do the same dances and talk about the same wars.”

 

“Court is court because you wish it to be,” Philippe says.

 

Louis turns, his eyes downcast, and Philippe isn't sure what he is looking at—his own milk-white reflection in the water, or something else—for the first time tonight he comes close to his brother, pausing at his side, his fingertips drifting delicately in circles around him.

 

“Do you ever long for strangeness?” he asks, in an uncertain voice that Philippe has not heard in years. “A sour wind, or a new smell.”

 

“My life is strange enough,” Philippe says.

 

Louis is very close to him. He can feel the hairs on his arm, raised by the cold in the water. 

 

“And I know that you crave normalcy.” Philippe feels Louis' fingertips brush against his skin, though Louis seems entranced by the statue in front of him, unaware. “Every plot or rumor or conspiracy we so much as hear of sends you into fits.”

 

“Shouldn't they?”

 

“Of course,” Philippe scoffs, “but do not pretend you long for intrigue. It exhausts you.” There is a long strand of dark hair stuck to Louis' cheek; Philippe reaches up and pulls it away. Louis' pale blue eyes follow his hand as it retreats, and then they travel up his body, meet his own; Philippe feels a chill that has little to do with the water.

 

“You say this isn't like me,” he says, turning his body, “to be rash, to be incorrect.” Perhaps he is feverish, after all. Philippe shifts instinctively closer to his warmth. “I begin to fear you are right.”

 

“You are the King,” Philippe says. He is only an inch taller than his brother, perhaps two, but he feels miniscule. “The Sun. The example of morality and propriety for all of France.”

 

“Soulless, then,” Louis says. He looks—indescribably sad. “At times I fear there is little of me left.”

 

“Louis, you are never not yourself.”

 

Louis flinches, at that; rarely do they ever call one another by their names, anymore. The word is  _brother,_ and little else. 

 

“We used to play here. Do you remember?”

 

Of course he remembers.

 

“We chased Henriette—all down the avenue, even though our governesses told us—”

 

“ _Not to chase a Lady,_ ” Philippe continues, “ _as it is improper for a Lady to run._ ”

 

Louis smiles, a thin line of his lips, a private smile. His eyes are somewhere between Philippe's collarbone and his face. He feels pinioned.

 

“How many rules we broke,” Louis says, more to himself. “We hid in those back passages for hours to avoid our lessons—you gave them such trouble, at the virginal—”

 

He understands now, or thinks he does. 

 

_I miss it, too,_ he wants to say. He says nothing.

 

“Kiss me,” Louis says, then, his eyes rising to meet his brother's, and whatever spell was being laid is abruptly broken. Philippe blinks, takes a step back. “I wish to know what it is like.”

 

He tries not to sputter; he does not succeed. 

 

“Kiss you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“For Heaven's sake, why?”

 

Louis tilts his head, furrowing his brow. “Because I wish it.”

 

“Kiss you.”

 

“As you would a woman,” Louis says, “or your friend, the Chevalier.”

 

“You know well that he is not a friend.”

 

“A lover, then.” Louis looks impatient, has moved to close the distance between them, and Philippe is very aware of his nakedness under the water, his own nakedness. “Once. What will it hurt?”

 

“I fear you  _are_ unwell.”

 

“Philippe.”

 

He could almost groan. Trust Louis to know his weakness to his own name, and in that mouth.

 

Louis takes his wrists in his hands, and holds them gently below the water, and Philippe wonders if he gazes at his mistresses this way—as if he were dreaming them.

 

“What has come over you?” says Philippe.

 

“I do not know,” says Louis.

 

Philippe cannot remember the number of men he has kissed—in the hundreds, surely. But bending his head to his brother is like the very first time, somehow, though Louis opens his mouth to him like every lover he's ever had, and his kiss is every other kiss, and Philippe feels a strange and not unwelcome heat in his spine, smells the perfume in Louis' hair, feels the cool skin of his hips beneath his hands; it lasts only an instant before Louis breaks it, and looks him in the face as if searching for something there.

 

“I will never understand you,” Philippe says, tripping over his tongue, embarrassed that he seems to have no wit left in him to loosen all of this.

 

Louis smiles, the look of a satisfied cat, and reaches up to tuck Philippe's hair behind one ear, like a doting mother.

 

“I love you dearly,” he says, a sobriety in his voice that makes Philippe's skin prickle. “I know I do not often show it.”

 

Philippe swallows. Louis is still inches from him. 

 

He tasted clean, new.

 

“Come,” Louis says, finally, stepping back, beginning to wade toward the edge of the fountain again. “The Chevalier has surely noticed you are gone.”

 

Philippe watches him climb out, all his skin bright, stoop to pick up his nightdress from the muddy grass, fumble it on, like any other man—like his brother, and not a King.

 

He tells himself to remember it. The strangeness. A dream, if that is what it is. Tomorrow he'll be reprimanded for spending so much money on new jabots, or told of a battle he cannot lead, or any number of Louis' favorite annoyances, but he can almost imagine the sound of the governess scolding them from far down the avenue, the smell of wet bronze in the sun, before any of it—he kissed the King of France. 

 

For a moment, Louis was vulnerable.

 

By the time Philippe has climbed out of the fountain and pulled his clothes back on, Louis is a white ghost in the trees, moving back toward the palace, toward the hedge where they left their robes. He could be a spirit, an angel, if Philippe were inclined to believe in such things—a wandering piece of sunlight in the dark.

 

His, now, in his way.

 

Philippe, as ever, follows.

 


End file.
